China’s Watergate

The Bo Xilai scandal—having passed through its le Carré and Enron stages—has entered the Watergate chapter, though it’s not at all clear where the story goes from here. In the Times today, Jonathan Ansfield and Ian Johnson have laid out a compelling explanation for why the most powerful men in China were truly unnerved by Bo. It was not because he was a good politician and they were not; it was not because his wife may have killed an Englishman. It was, it seems, because he was turning the full force of government power on his own peers, and listened in on their calls.

Among a dozen sources, Ansfield and Johnson cite a Party-connected political analyst who believes Bo “had tried to tap the phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in recent years.” The lawyers and tycoons that Bo counted among his enemies had long ago stopped using the phones because they knew they were monitored. But his bosses, it seems, never thought he would go that far.

Let’s be clear: this is explosive stuff. In less capable hands, the story would smack of the kind of strategic smear that is a classic of purge-politics: pile on the wounded figure, to the point where any accusation becomes plausible. But, as anyone in the China-watching trade can tell you, Ansfield and Johnson are as seasoned and circumspect as you get. This is not a single-source story. It is a broadly sourced piece that suggests Bo was pursuing a campaign of backroom surveillance akin to Nixon aides’ bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

We don’t yet know how far this strategy extended, and whether other officials were involved. (It seems implausible to me that Bo was the first senior Party leader to decide that the immense powers of surveillance might have private political uses.) The difference, of course, is that when Nixon’s “dirty tricks,” as they were known, were uncovered, the legal system took over. In China, the system works differently. As Zhou Yongkang, China’s security boss, wrote in a recent commentary highlighted on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site, the law must always be secondary to the Party. In Zhou’s words, it “should always adhere to the Party’s cause first … and determinedly resist forces hostile to China’s socialist political system, as well as erroneous political views in the West.”

At this point, neither hostile outside forces, nor Western political views, seem to be the greatest threat to the Party. That distinction may be belong to the Party itself.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.